Does Vegas 10 64bit Handle large JPGs without Crashing?

[Kevin Janisch]

Vegas 8.0c on XP 32bit crashes on me when rendering out projects with large jpgs. I'm aware of some of the work arounds such as resizing, converting to png, etc but been considering going to Windows 7 for a while now and was wondering if Sony Vegas 10 64bit handles large jpgs without crashing when rendering. Many thanks.

[Leslie Wand]

how large is large?

i always use .png on tl - never had a problem in either 32 / 64 bit.

[Gregory Barringer]

Yes, I usually don't resize. Mine are from a Nikon D3s., 12 mp.

[Jeff Harper]

As has been said, yes it will, but Vegas has claimed to work with larger photos for awhile now, and I still find it much better to to a quick conversion using Irfanview. Reasonably sized photos handle better on the timelline.

I use lots of wedding photos on my timeline on occasion. With Irfanview I resize a thousand photos in just a few minutes, and they look just as good to me as the larger versions, and they take up much less space on my drive.

I resize them to be somewhat wider than my project settings so I can pan and crop if needed, and then I have easy to handle and smooth playing photos with no playback issues.

Of course if you need 8000 or 4000 pixels wide photos, I guess you need it, but for me I never need wider than 1500 pixels.

[Edward Troxel]

I would try two things:

1. Reduce the "Ram Preview" size down to a very small number (like 16)

2. Change the number of rendering threads to 1.

[Larry Reavis]

I always edit in 8c and sometimes do have the infamous red-thumbnail bug appear whenever I try to pan and crop on a really huge .JPG, such as some of those from NASA. However, often I can do the pan-crop edit upon re-opening 8c. I currently have my Dynamic RAM Preview set for 128 MB, and - as always - rendering threads to 1 . . . not that I ever actually try to render in 8c.

8c regularly crashes during render. Instead, I use 9e-64 bits for rendering. It almost never does anything quirky.

If I have a 32-bit plug in (usually one of the excellent Mike Crash plugins), then I render in 9c-32; but again I set rendering threads to 1 and hope for the best. Usually it will render.

If not, then I create a special .VEG that only includes the scenes that need the 32-bit plugjn, render to Cineform, then put the Cineform clip on a new track above the offending 32-bit plugin and render in 9e-64. A bit cumbersome, but totally surprise-free.

Incidentally, I have to do the same cumbersome work-around with BCC7 in Vegas 10. BCC7 is a treat, but getting v10 to behave is a trick. Better to render out the effect in Cineform, put it back on the TL in 8c, and get on with life.

[Kevin Janisch]

Thanks guys for all of the replies. Decided to stay with 8.0c on 32bit XP a while longer as it's been the most stable editing platform I've used (used Premiere for 10 years prior) and I don't want to possibly resolve minor issues with workable workarounds in exchange for possibly bigger problems with an upgrade when I'm productive now with my current setup.

Larry, your statement "Better to render out the effect in Cineform, put it back on the TL in 8c, and get on with life." is dead on in many ways. It's so easy to get sucked into the technical aspect of getting things to work the way they should instead of using workarounds and getting back to the "real work" at hand, creating. Many thanks.

[Peter Riding]

I've been using Vegas Pro 10c for slideshows of stills from Canon 5D Mark II files. The original files are JPEGs from RAW; I do convert these JPEGs to PNG prior to using in Vegas but they are still large files - which must be the heart of the problem. I use about 100-120 per 20 minute show if the show is mainly stills. The average png filesize is 14mb but some are over 20mb.

The reason for using PNG is that I find putting a portrait aspect image on a transparent landscape background gives me greater flexibility when positioning and moving images in the Vegas Event Pan Crop tool. Every image therefore in effect becomes a landscape one regardless of whether the actual visible image is portrait or landscape. I size them all at 3840px to allow for panning and do the conversion as a batch action in Photoshop, then just drag the pngs from Bridge into the Vegas timeline.

I'm using Windows 7 64 bit, i7 processor, 12gb RAM.

No crashing isues.

Pete

[Jeff Harper]

3840 pixels is quite larger than necessary. You can resize them to no larger than 2000 and you'd still have tons of latitude for panning. I dare say you could go as small as 1500 across and would notice virtually no difference in quality, and the files would handle so much nicer.

[Kevin Janisch]

Originally Posted by Peter Riding

The reason for using PNG is that I find putting a portrait aspect image on a transparent landscape background gives me greater flexibility when positioning and moving images in the Vegas Event Pan Crop tool. Every image therefore in effect becomes a landscape one regardless of whether the actual visible image is portrait or landscape. I size them all at 3840px to allow for panning and do the conversion as a batch action in Photoshop, then just drag the pngs from Bridge into the Vegas timeline.

Hi Pete, Thank you for the response. Can you elaborate a little on using PNGs on a transparent landscape background in the Pan Crop tool. Are you doing this in Photoshop and then bringing them into Vegas? Portrait jpg images have been a PITA as I've been going under pic properties in Vegas and doing a 90 degree rotate and then using the Pan Crop tool. Many thanks.

[Jeff Harper]

If I understand your problem, Kevin:

In windows go to the folder where your photos are located. open a photo you want to re-orient with windows photo viewer and Rotate in one click with the arrow. Hit next arrow to move on to the next image. change the next image you come to or keep going till you get to the next one you need to change. Your photo will now be permanently properly orientated as it will be saved properly by windows. You can click through and change a hundred images in just a couple of minutes. It's the quickest way I know.

[Kevin Janisch]

Thanks to all for the workaround on this issue. The 10MP JPGs were indeed the issue as I could replicate the crash where I had the large JPGs. Converting to PNG or resizing just wasn't an option as my workflow on this project consisted of drag and dropping images into Vegas from Picassa, so they weren't all in the same folder, so going through and pulling the images and converting was out of the question in order to meet my deadline.

Just by changing the rendering threads from 4 to 2 I was able to successfully render out my projects which contained HDV, SD Mov, and a number of 10MP jpg images in Vegas Pro 8.0c.

Now here is the interesting part and also one of the reasons why I switched from Premiere a few years back. I was able to render out 2 80 minute Vegas projects simultaneously which both had a great deal of 10MP jpg images. I only did this after my first project was able to get past the large JPGs in the render. So Vegas 8.0c was back to it's former glory once again.

Now this is what's even cooler. I never do this but I was doing the render during the day and if it bombed I would just have it render overnight, but I didn't have my laptop so while both of these projects were rendering I was surfing the net with Firefox, Using Photoshop CS2, and even playing Playstation 2 on the same machine using my EZCap USB converter. Not a single hiccup. Once again, I never do this. Usually it's set to render, lock the machine and never touch the PC until the next day. Premiere Pro 2 would actually crash if I breathed too hard on the keyboard, and that was with rendering 1 SD Project (not 2 HDV simultaneously, and Premiere can't do that anyways), without any large JPGs.

So, thanks again and hopefully this thread will help somebody else in the future.

Windows XP 32bit, SP3
3.5 GB Ram

[Kevin Janisch]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

If I understand your problem, Kevin:

In windows go to the folder where your photos are located. open a photo you want to re-orient with windows photo viewer and Rotate in one click with the arrow. Hit next arrow to move on to the next image. change the next image you come to or keep going till you get to the next one you need to change. Your photo will now be permanently properly orientated as it will be saved properly by windows. You can click through and change a hundred images in just a couple of minutes. It's the quickest way I know.

Thanks Jeff, I'll give it a shot. I guess Vegas can't read the tag as the orientation is correct in Picasa. I've been dragging from Picasa into Vegas directly for a quick turn around project. Future projects I'll make copies to another folder and then convert to PNG. Thanks.

[Mike Kujbida]

IrfanView (it's free) allows you to do batch conversions and image rotation is one of several options allowed.
It's also extremely quick at it.

[Jeff Harper]

As Mike says, Irfanview is great for conversions, and so fast. You can load up hundreds of photos and reduce them to a preset max width, say of 1500, and let it rip. I've never done image rotation in it.